In addition to flying the group’s caravan around the Caribbean, and once it’s dark there flying the XCub low along river valleys in Idaho, I found a rentable caravan in British Columbia to get in another live weather sunset golden hour. Just flew through a storm to land on small dirt a strip in the middle of a long lake (CAG4). There was fortunately a break in the clouds as I came in. Absolutely beautiful. After landing I switched out of VR to get a shot.
It’s one of those runways made challenging by a tall tree literally in front of the runway that I can’t imagine exists in real life, but MSFS just models a solid line of trees along the shore.
The combination of FSEconomy and live weather has gotten me so much more addicted to flight sim. My landings have improved greatly in the last few weeks of this addiction.
Soooo… I saved up $300K and looked at what planes were available. Certainly wasn’t going to spend that on a worn out C172. Thought it’d be fun to find something that would be good in Alaska or Hawaii, my favorite places to fly.
Looked at Grumman Geese (Gooses?), since there’s a great payware one and a decent one included with the 40th Anniversary Edition, but they were over $400K. But there was a Grumman G-44 Widgeon for about $200K, and I had the Flysimware G-44 and I’d barely spent any time with it. And it was in Juneau. So, boughted it!
Leased it to Qt3, and have been flying the flights for the group. Anyone else here have it? If not, it’s a really nice seaplane. Holds 5 passengers, and it’s amphibious so you can snag those lucrative water runway missions that tend to just sit in the list.
Once I get enough in the bank, I’ll sell it and get a Goose so that all of you can use it if you want. (There’s a pretty good Inibuilds Goose included with the 40th Anniv. update, as well as a freeware Big Radials version and a much better payware Big Radials release.)
I got the money for the Widgeon by flying the Qt3 Longitude around the West Coast. Or, rather, by letting it fly itself on autopilot during the workday for a couple of days this week. It recreates one of my favorite parts of flying across the country – seeing the amazing variety of ground features.
That all looks great. But then, going from NM up to Juneau, we see that some of British Columbia looks fantastic, while other parts look as bad as China and Russia…
Oh! One more post… Discovered something really cool. When I’m not flying in VR, I can use the Duet app to turn my iPad Pro into an external touchscreen monitor for my PC.
So move the TDS GTN750Xi down to the iPad and I have a touchscreen GPS to use with my planes! Haven’t tried it with planes that have glass Garmin cockpits yet to see how it works there, but for planes that support the TDS anyway it’s pretty awesome.
Excellent tip! I’ll have to try this. I have used the GTN750 as a pop-out off the toolbar in everything I’ve flown since getting the mod. I don’t have to fiddle with finding extra files that way. One of my favorite things about it is being able to change the default type of information presented in the four corners. I frequently change one to ETE and another to wind speed and direction, which helps a ton on long journeys with real weather.
Your flights over Alaska look great but they remind me of all the flying over Canada I did along with @Pedro as we helped Oji Air up there for FSE a while back. So much snow. At least Alaska has much more variance of mountains and coastline.
I also like that little G-44. I’ll have to check it out for a flight. Don’t forget the Kodiak though as you can use the amphib version if you have enough passengers or cargo to fly out of a seaport.
Great shots! And the view from 40,000 feet can be especially gratifying if it’s an area you fly regularly at less than 10,000 feet. My ill-fated bush trip through the US Southwest was done at 1,000 feet AGL; I passed over at 30,000ft a few months later and could pick out all the features I’d mentioned/featured.
I’ve been thinking about getting Gamepass which would give me this, it looks fantastic.
I’ve not looked through the whole thread yet, but is the making money part of things a mod you tack on? I searched “economy mod” in here and pointed to FSEconomy, but that was about three years ago.
I think the idea of making money to buy better planes and build up a collection sounds marvelous.
Most of them are not mods, per se, but third party utilities that plug in to the sim via Sim Connect (another utility). Some of them do have mods for in-game panels and such though. There is no economy in the base game.
Some of the economy add-ons are focused on progressing from plane to bigger plane, as you suggest, some are more about simulating an airline pilot career, and some are just mission generators.
Start here for FSEconomy. It’s not super exciting, and the interface is just functional, but adding progression to the sim works for a lot of people. For me it’s kinda what a lot of people get out of ETS/ATS, just a chill time making deliveries and upgrading my plane/airline.
The other big alternative is Neofly, which Ginger_Yellow can probably fill you in on if you’re interested. I think that one is probably more dynamic and has greater visual appeal.
There are a couple of others too, I think, but I can’t remember them now.
FSEconomy as mentioned is mainly a mission generator in function. There’s a persistent world with aircraft both player and “bank” owned and airports that generate missions. You can rent, and later when you have the cash, buy aircraft to fly missions to make cash. Missions are just taking people and/or cargo from a to b. An air taxi service basically. You yourself as a pilot are not in a persistent location so you can rent an aircraft anywhere. I’ve been flying live weather sunsets in a Grand Caravan in the Caribbean, then later in the XCub I bought in the Idaho hills, and after that either sunset around Victoria BC or a night flight in Iceland’s pre-midnight sun glowing twilight.
It’s all web based with a very programmer designed UI that takes a bit of getting used to.
There’s also NeoFly which I have downloaded but haven’t tried yet. That offers a persistent career mode where you begin with a starter plane and earn money to buy better ones. It also offers more involved missions like you need to stay below 1000’ AGL or land softly (<200 fpm). There’s a free version and a newer early access version that you need to donate to get access to. I threw them $5 and plan to try it out this weekend.
Thanks @Pedro and @Thrag - Thanks so much for the helpful information! I was just reading a bit more about both of these systems and it looks like either of them could work.
For FSEconomy, if you buy a plane does that stay where you last flew it?
A career progression is exactly what I’m looking for, yes, similar to ATS/ETS2.
Also a way to, for example, fly around the world in one plane, constantly hopping from one spot to another and enjoying the views and adventures along the way.
In either case, I’m in. Ordered another SSD because no drive space. That’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll sign up for GamePass and expect to have MSFS downloaded by August. ;)
Yes, planes stay where you left them. Their position is persistent.
Though can can put in a job for another pilot to ferry them somewhere. And once you own a plane you can choose to rent it out, and can set a home base for it and a “bonus” amount that costs people to move it further away from the base or pays them to move it closer. So you can provide financial incentive for renters to bring the plane back.
If you want to investigate further, I’d say the big ones are:
FSEconomy (multiplayer focused)
Neofly (GA oriented but you can build to airliners and do FBOs if you want)
Air Hauler 2 and A Pilot’s Life 2 (airline pilot sims)
Sykpark (mission generator)
Some are free, or free to try, and some are paid, though none are particularly expensive in the grand scheme of things when it comes to flight sims.
Just looking over all of these suggested so far, I think the Neofly one seems to be the one I’d like to try first. That looks fantastic, and adds so many elements that I’d like to have in the game.
The best thing about this is that I was planning to upgrade my computer anyway, and this is a nudge for that too. So new processor and graphics card inbound as well.
